Summary of DTV Tuners w/ (standard) DVD Recorders

Considering folks could use such a device just as a digital tuner, they definitely belong here.

The panny EZ17 for $200.. that's not a bad deal at all.

Not one has a QAM tuner.

The Panasonic recorders have QAM.

Ron

Not according to those two links.

No one knows for sure - just because it's not listed in the specs doesn't mean it doesn't have a QAM tuner.

hopefully the introduction of all these recorders in the $150-300 range will push down the price of DTV set top boxes currently going for $150-200.

I do know for sure on the Panasonic recorders. Although I'm not directly on the design team (I did help to build a suite of test ATSC bitstreams for the decoder engineers), they sit across the hall from me.

For those keeping track, the demodulator chip is the ATI (AMD) Theater 312.

http://ati.amd.com/products/theater314/index.html

Ron

The DMR-EZ17 should be available very soon.

Ron

They will not make them available even one day early, and will not publically foreshadow their availability, because to do otherwise would render their vendor's and their own remaining inventory of NTSC-only products virtually worthless.

Is that the same chip as what's in the Samsung H260F? If not, is it still a fifth-gen-performance chip?

that's assuming that their vendors don't know of the product pipeline - a risky assumption.

why do you think the Samsung 260F is so hard to come by at CC/BB?

And you know this because .....

Sounds like that chip can do QAM.

I went ahead and edited that statement out of my post. Some of the ATSC recorders can upconvert DVDs to HD, so I guess that means HD output.

I have a technical question. Assuming a device outputs video through component (nevermind HDMI or DVI for now)... Does it cost more (processing power) to decode and output HD 720p/1080i than it does to decode HD, downconvert and output 480p/480i?

Can, but will it??

Probably not, it's all done with one chip - which has multiple outputs.

Won't know till someone tests it. And even after someone says it does, there's always a ..... BUT

These look great. However I had a couple of thoughts. I didn't see any that would record in HD via Blu-ray of some such. Also do any have firewire or any other ability to record anything but OTA?

Rick R

Unfortunately, these products are still a ways off for the U.S. market.

None of the products announced so far can record in high-def. They run all programming through a NTSC encoder.

Cable compatibility brings CableLabs into the mix, and some manufacturers don't want to open that can of worms.

By this I assume you mean that they are making standard DVDs. Thus 480i x 720. So I guess this is still better than VHS and it is anamorphic widescreen.

Rick R

Yes.

What I would like to see are products that save content to the hard drive in high-definition, allow playback in high-definition, but that use a NTSC encoder when saving to DVD. To my knowledge, no such products are yet announced for the U.S. market.

again why would any recorder need to do anything (NTSC encoding) with an MPEG stream (incoming ATSC or QAM) when it will end up in MPEG on the DVD?

The only time NTSC is involved is at the SD output, no?

Eh? ATSC is up to 19.4Mbps, almost twice what is supported by the DVD specification. The DVD specification is also limited to MP@ML decoding, so you can't store MP@HL content o the disk.

Once the [up to] 19.4Mbps ATSC signal is run through the MPEG-2 decoder, it is no longer MPEG-2. It is an uncompressed video signal. You can't stick an uncompressed video signal on a DVD in any format; it's got to be recompressed using MPEG-2, and there's what there NTSC encoder comes in.

Why couldn't the incoming MPEG2 stream be transcoded directly to an MPEG2 stream the DVDr recorder can handle? I assumed the whole point was to keep everything in 1s and 0s format and not lose PQ along the way (by decoding/encoding).

480p would be 19.4 Mbps?

The signal remains digital, of course. But you can't get from 12-19Mbps 720p/1080i MPEG-2 to <10Mbps 480p MPEG-2 without re-encoding. In this case, the re-encoding is performed by a MP@ML MPEG-2 encoder, which is also used to encode an NTSC (CCIR-656) input.

I think there may be some confusion from the term "NTSC encoder." I am not referring to a part that encodes digital video into analog NTSC format. I'm referring to parts that accept NTSC video input (i.e. CCIR-656) and encode it into 480i digital.

These are just new versions of past DVD recorder products with the ability to take a ATSC source as input.

ATSC defines 19.4Mbps, yes, although the original broadcast format is rarely 480p. It is typically 720p (FOX, ABC) and 1080i (CBS, NBC, PBS). In contrast, DVD defines a maximum of 10.04 Mbps.